Stephen Humphrey

Professor of Management
, Research Director of the Center for Teams and Negotiation
Department: Management and Organization, Center for Teams and Negotiation
Office: 439 Business Building
Phone: 814-863-0597
Fax: 814-863-7261
E-mail: seh25@psu.edu
Member of Faculty Since: 2008

Introduction

Stephen E. Humphrey is Professor of Management in the Smeal College of Business at Pennsylvania State University. He received his Ph.D. in Organizational Behavior and Human Resources Management (with a minor in Industrial/Organizational Psychology) from Michigan State University and his B.S. in Psychology from James Madison University.

Dr. Humphrey's research focuses on the structure of work, with a primary focus on teamwork and the drivers of team success.

Current Research

My research has focused primarily on answering two questions:

How do you make a great team?

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How do you make a team great?

These two questions capture the essence of what I am passionate about in Organizational Behavior. Considering the two research interests, my first question gets at issues of the “bottom-up” formative design of work teams. That is, if one wants to build a successful team from scratch, what are the issues that are most important? It is through this lens that I have addressed topics such as the “seeding” of teams, putting the best members into the most strategically core roles, investigating the impact of dyadic relationships in teams, configuring the reward or leadership structure, structuring the team to capitalize on different beliefs and opinions, and designing work to improve motivational and social processes.

The second question deals with the “top-down” management of existing teams. That is, if we look at existing teams embedded in time, how does this temporal context affect a team's functioning? This question deals with such issues as member and role changes, changes in rewards and leadership structure, and the progression towards an endpoint.

Across both questions, a critical focus has been to break apart the nested levels within teams, such that I am interested in something more than just the climate of a team. Instead, I have tried to focus my research on the “organizing” of teams, exploring the fundamental components of a team (such as job characteristics, roles, dyads, and sub-groups) to see how individuals within these situations combine together to create “teams”. In pursuing my research, I have endeavored to test my questions in field, lab, and archival populations, primarily with a quantitative focus.